This might be the most important topic of them all! Learning to make music, and being good at it is just a small part of developing your career. The idea behind this video and blog is not to push you away from your dreams, it is actually the opposite, my idea is to pass you some of the developing strategies that you can make in order that you start doing all these things as soon as possible, as you will start doing them after some time for sure.
Developing and running your career, will not be much different than running a company or any other kind of business. We all love to make music and being in that meditative state of mind while we are lost inside the DAW and being occupied by manipulating the sound waves through time, but we all need to face many other parts of that job, and those other aspects of developing a career might be even more important than music. At one festival in Switzerland, one of the pioneers of Psy-trance music have told me ten years ago one really interesting sentence. That time, I didn't want to believe him, but after a while, I learned the same lesson. That sentence was:
It doesn't really matter how your music is, if you want to have a career, you will need to be good in selling that music and selling your sels.
I am aware that most of you won't like this. Especially if you are still young and super passionate about the music. This is a more philosophical question and approach than it is connected to music! Every human being love some kind of music, and music is maybe the most popular thing in the world, and that bring all kinds of benefits to the musicians. Playing at the big parties and travelling around the world, every weekend being in different places is a dream of a huge amount of people, therefore some people will do everything to succeed in achieving this goal. They will do much more than just making good music. All of these things have created a "game" that is being played on the way to get gigs and the business models have been created, and if you wish to develop your career, you will need to play this game as there is no choice.
If you understand the other artist will make much less music, and after they make music, they will focus on marketing and promotion, which will bring them more listeners than to the artist who don't do much of the marketing and promotion. As I see it, there is no other choice. Everything I wrote about this is if you dream about doing this professionally and earning for life by being an Artist/DJ. If you have your regular job, and music is only your hobby, then this blog won't affect you much, but for the ones who are dreaming to do only this, this can be a good lesson.
Besides making the music, you will need to have many other skills. You will need to have great social skills, you will need to be ready to play in front of a huge amount of people, you will need to be ready for spending a huge amount of time in aeroplanes, airports, hotels, cars, and all that can be exhausting, but non of the jobs are easy, right? I thought that after finishing a good track the job is done, but actually this is only a first step! After that all other things are coming, as bringing the listeners to your Soundcloud, facebook, Instagram. The more followers you have on those networks, more people will see the post you post next time. Every time you post a new track, more people will see it and more listeners you will get. The more emails you have, more listeners you will bring through your email campaigns. For each track, you will need to do all of those things, posting the covers, videos, samples on Soundcloud, making the playlists on Spotify, recording a mixes, videos of you playing those mixes, youtube...
The best is that you always have a plan and the list of the thing you should do after you finish a track, and then you can go through your list and finishing one by one task.
Check the video where I spoke about this topic: